New York City - Alicia's Off Broadway Play

Sept 2016

We headed down to NYC to visit Noah and Alicia, primarily
to see Alicia's off Broadway play, but also because Dave hadn't seen
Noah and Alicia's New York University digs yet. We drove down through what Google
Maps called "the usual traffic," which wasn't bad until we hit the city.
At which point "the usual traffic" looked like a
good reason to walk. It would have been faster. Hopping on one
leg. Backwards.

Along the way we passed the Intrepid, a de-commissioned aircraft carrier
open to the public for tours, which was vaguely interesting.
Standing outside it was a large
billboard talking about the newly added Star Trek exhibition, which was very
interesting. Turned out they have a mock up of the bridge from
"Star Trek: The Next Generation" along with a bunch of interactive
displays that allow you to "graduate" from star fleet, then go back in
time and visit the namesake for the Starship Intrepid... which, of
course, is the aircraft carrier. The best part... "dressing in
star fleet uniforms is encouraged. The tour is in English but
Klingon translators are on hand if needed."

Eventually we made it to our little boutique hotel that was nicely
decorated but consisted of a tiny room with a marble but marginal
shower, and was
much more expensive than the gigantic suite we had in Denver. But that's NYC for you.

NYC is fascinating because there's just a vibe, an energy to it that is
hard to match anywhere else. There's the cross-cultural influences
that seem like LA, mixed in with old brick and mortar neighborhoods that seem
like Boston, an insane number of restaurants (it may be against city
ordinances to use a kitchen in NY for anything other then coffee and
bagels), and an around the clock hustle and bustle that never lets up.
There's the subway system, a bunch of little interconnected underground cities with an
internal logic all their own and a serious ventilation problem.
There's Time Square and the financial district and parks that are always
full of about as varied a group of people as you are ever likely to come
across.

Noah and Alicia's apartment was small (ok, munchkin-scaled) but comfortable, mostly below
street level, with a kitchen the size of our refrigerator in Acton.
It's just down the street from Washington Square Park with the iconic
Washington Square Arch. Not far away is a coffee / board gaming shop / meeting place where you
can rent and play games for $5 an hour, which Dave considered clutch.
About a block away were the first set of distributed buildings,
including the law school, that made
up NYU, which Alison considered clutch.
And it is NYU graduate student housing, and therefore affordable (for
NYC) which
we both considered clutch.

Alicia's play was at a small venue in Times Square. It was one of
three plays and ran ten or fifteen minutes. She'd hooked into the
NY play scene and attracted a number of very talented actors and they did a great job of bringing Alicia's vision to life.
We won't do any spoilers because it looks like it may end up playing at
other locations and we don't want to spoil the surprise. Below, a shot of the people involved in the three plays after the show
ended (Alicia and Noah are in the background, Alison doing her best
"Blue Steel" pose), and Time Square once we left the building at about 11
pm, crazy busy. It might as well have been the middle of the day -
NYC truly remains the city the never sleeps.

We took the opportunity to take the subway and visit the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, which was
awesome, and leads (naturally) to a story about why NYC needs to install
air conditioning in the subways. It was hot in New York when we
visited, with 230% humidity. They literally had a general heat
advisory in effect and upted the ante with warning signs EVERYWHERE about the possibility of
heat stroke if you entered the labyrinth of interconnecting subway
stops. Turns out those NY subway trains generate waste heat like a
dying sun and when you add thousands of people, 230% humidity, and an
assumption that natural circulation is better because it's, well,
natural, you have a fairly decent rendition of HELL ON EARTH. It was
over a hundred degrees on the platforms. It was so hot people started
sweating before they entered the underground because if you didn't get
your body temperature down you couldn't make the ten minute wait for a
train without ending up steam baked
like cafeteria mac and cheese (the trains, thanks be to our great God(s), were air conditioned,
pumping all their waste heat out to... oh, wait, yeah, right into the subway
tunnels).

But the Met was worth it. The place consumes an entire, large city block, and
you could spend a week there 24/7 and still not see everything.

Dave loved the area devoted to old armor (medieval and oriental),
swords, and guns. The guns ranged from classic matchlocks, back
when each weapon was hand-crafted individually with an incredible amount of
detail carved into the stock and guard, to more modern handguns, up
through the end of the 18th and early 19th century. The armor put the
display at the
Worchester Art Museum we'd seen a few months earlier to shame
- they even have two sets of armor reputed to have belonged to Henry the
VIII in both his young and later rotund states (very rotund, judging by
said armor).

The section on oriental art was stunning as well. With more
than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the 3rd millennium B.C. to the
21st century it is one of the largest and is the most comprehensive in
the West. Wealthy collectors Florence and Herbert Irving managed to bring back an incredible amount of antique art from a variety
of locations in Asia. And then there was Astor Court, modeled after a
courtyard in a 17th-century domestic residence in Suzhou, a city famous
for its gardens, occupying an entire room with a glass ceiling to make
it feel authentic.

Above: This was technically not part of the Asian exhibit, but you
could see it from there, a room that looked like it was being converted
to represent ancient Egypt. Below: 13th- and 14th-century
narrative paintings known as emaki and a collection of folding screens
dating from the 15th through the 18th century were on display, along
with tastefully displayed Buddhist sculptures, and Alison's favorite, a
taxidermy deer carcass that had been encased in crystal balls from the
size of marbles to the size of bowling balls.

We also experienced that lovely combination of fascinated + repelled at
this baby:

It wasn't just the art that made the place amazing. The
architecture of the place was astounding, with parts that looked like
they belong in Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican to modern glass and
steel sun rooms to entire facades that looked like something from turn
of the century London but were all inside.

And then there were the two dozen or so rooms that were reconstructed
to reflect different eras and abodes, with little plaques explaining everything you were
looking at... all lifted from the real locations and recreated floor
board by floor board in separate rooms in the met.

Of course, a museum wouldn't be complete without a giant collection of
one of kind Tiffany's. And we don't mean the company that
creates charm bracelets that you can buy for a hundred bucks from anyone
else and then
mark them up by five hundred for the name, we mean the original Tiffany
studio that did unique and amazing pieces of art. And there were other unique creations from
other artists, from non-traditional furniture to
fireplaces that look like they came off a high budget fantasy film's
set.

So the Met was cool, but not as cool as seeing Alicia and Noah
both doing something they love. And, since Alicia was the star
of the weekend, we'll close out with a picture of her (that Dave
didn't take, just something that looks cool and we think
reflects her true spirit).